Alley Cat Book Store & Gallery

BOOKS, ART, & COMMUNITY

Alley Cat is also an event space, community space, and art gallery. Dedicated to offering valuable resources to organizers, artists, writers and members of our neighborhood, our intentions are followed by actions.

Make your way to the back of the store and discover our spacious art gallery, where local and international art adorns the high walls. Sometimes you might stumble into an art opening, poetry reading, meeting, or film screening.

Books

If you're looking for a lot of books and a pleasant place to peruse them, seek no further. We're a general interest store, so we have a little of everything. Our staff is happy to help you locate specific titles or you can roam around discovering wondrous obscurities you never knew you couldn't live without.

Residency

The Alley Cat residency program was founded in 2014 with the goal of offering writers a welcoming space to work in the heart of a lively literary community.

Lourdes Figueroa

Lourdes Figueroa was born in Yuba City, California during a trip her parents made from Mexico to the USA when they worked in the campo tilling the soil for tomatoes. Lourdes is a proud 2009 and 2011 VONA alum. Her work has been published in the SF Poet’s 11 2008 & 2010 an Anthology by Jack Hirschman, in Eleven Eleven, Something Worth Revising, Night Music, elderly, the zine Mirage, Spooky Actions Books published her first chapbook, yolotl, and her poem War America War was published by Backwords Press. She received her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry at the University of San Francisco. She works in San Francisco as community organizer, a families case-worker, and occasionally as a camera assistant. She continues to believe in your lung and your throat.

Reina

Reina is a 22 year old poet and comic enthusiast from the bay area. They are passionate about writing uplifting stories for tired, angry, and sad brown girls of all walks of life. In their spare time, they spend time studying and taking care of zucchini plants (and 2 cats and a dog).

Raina J. León

Raina J. León is an Afro-Latina, native Philadelphian, daughter, sister, Hackermom, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, and recently entered into the Poetry Incubator community in Chicago. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: (dis)locate, and the chapbook, profeta without refuge. She has received numerous fellowships and residencies and is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California. She will be the Fall 2019 Poet-in-residence Mentor at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

Support Alley Cat on Patreon!

There are a number of benefits to being an Alley Cat patron, and the best part is that you can help assure Alley Cat’s continued existence. Learn more here.